


they self-destruct in different ways

by PikaCheeka



Category: DRAMAtical Murder (Visual Novel)
Genre: Child Abuse, Conditioning, Emotional Manipulation, M/M, Medical Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con, many kinds of sex, pornography videos, psychological abuse, untreated trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-26
Updated: 2017-03-26
Packaged: 2018-10-10 23:36:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10450080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PikaCheeka/pseuds/PikaCheeka
Summary: A routine checkup takes an unexpected turn when Trip is forced to witness the horrors of Virus' past, and his own weaknesses are extorted.Virus, meanwhile, thinks his secrets are intact, until Trip's admission causes the walls he'd so carefully built to collapse, and threatens everything between them.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is probably my darkest fic (or at least it's up there), involving extensive references to rape and abuse (of children & adults), so please be aware of the archive warnings and decide whether this fic is for you. Most of my ViTri fics up until now reference severe sexual abuse in Virus' past - this is the story that really goes into it. The doctor from "the perfect specimen" makes a re-appearance in this as a nameless/faceless adult entity in their lives at the institute and in the years that follow, though the fics do not follow one another and can be read separately! THAT SAID, I know the opening scenario might be a bit puzzling, but it's not really relevant how ViTri found themselves in this situation. Please accept it as-is.
> 
> This is the fic to break 100,000 words total for Dmmd fics for me, 90,000+ of which have been for ViTri! I still have many more to write. Thank you for your continued support, kudos, bookmarks, and comments.

 

 

"Watch this," he flicks a button, opens a folder containing several dozen video files and rapidly opens the first one.

His reaction when he sees the shadows is immediate. He inexplicably knows what this is. "I can't."

"Watch or I'll tell them in the next room to shoot him," he grabs Trip's hair as he speaks, forces his head up.

Trip lets him, every nerve in his body screaming against the violation, the human touch he so despises even when it's friendly. Under no other circumstance would he allow for this, not even as a child did he allow for this kind of contact, but somehow they let things fall apart this far, let themselves accidentally book appointments together, and now Virus is in one locked room while he is in another, with the man who was head doctor at the institute, who specialized the experiments of male children in that particular unit, calmly standing behind him, holding him still as he sits at a desk staring blankly at a computer. _Neurological testing, my ass._

"I can't do this," he says again, dully, but the fight has gone out of him, replaced by a visceral pain he's never felt before as the video comes into focus.

"Didn't think you were the type to care what happened to kids."

“Don’t mean I like watching it.” Not that he hasn’t tried, curiosity getting the better of him as a teenager when he’d calmly gone through thousands of increasingly bizarre porn videos on the deep web. He’d learned that he had a surprisingly short list of turnoffs, kids topping a list that terminated after three entries.

“You have to do a lot of things in life you don’t like,” he sounds pleasant, gently admonishing, as he always did back then. “Just watch it.”

He exhales slowly, because he knew, even before it began, that this wasn’t about kids, that his horror wasn’t over a doctor he’d always known was foul proving to have peculiar tastes. Because the boy in the video is one he's never met, one he's known most of his life, one he doesn't recognize, one he sleeps beside occasionally. He can see a calendar on the wall, see the year at certain angles. Twenty-one years ago. Three years before… "No. It's 'cause it's..."

“E- 31337.” He finishes for him.

Which Trip knows, because he could never mistake the tilt of the head, the bow of the upper lip, the soft hair that fell in his face, things that thousands of experiments, procedures, surgeries, pills, and organ replacements could not do away with. Nine, an age he’d never known him at, but Trip would recognize him anywhere. Recognize him with a name, not a number, a name that he has burned deep into him. _Virus._

“This is the first time. Had to drug him for it, just told him it was a surgery and he was specially chosen for it. He was never that naive though. Once told me _mummy was a whore_ ,” he mimicked a child’s voice with the last words, and Trip feels something inside of him shrivel and die. Because the child on screen now is being touched, violated, as he lies there, confused and listless, face turned towards the camera as if he knows, even with unseeing eyes. He finds that despite his earlier pleas, his conviction that he couldn’t watch this, he can’t turn away now.

"He does whatever they tell him, even now. Every time he goes to the doctor now. He acts like a kid again."

"It's cause he's fucked up," he realizes as he says it that he has never given voice to this before, has never thought about it in that way, but he knows it to be true.

"No. It's because he knows what he's good for. That's all faggots are good for. He just learned early, yea? Look at this one,” he closes that video, clicks on the fourth in the folder, “Little slut's doing it all willingly, even asks for it."

He knows it's true, knows that Virus did what he had to do to survive, to adapt. He'd always been like that, about everything. And still, he feels the bile rise in his throat, feels a disgust and a horror he can't comprehend as he watches the video on the screen.  

Virus lounging on a sofa, wearing nothing but a man's shirt, hanging down to his knees and only half-buttoned. Virus glancing up with shuttered eyes as a shadow falls across the camera. He's clearly drugged, though Trip supposes that is something he is quicker to identify than most people. This one isn't even in an office, but a home, and Trip knows without having to be told that it's the home of one of the doctors, of the man right now stroking his hair, that sometimes when Virus disappeared for "overnight testing", it was because he was whisked off to someone's luxurious condo where he could sleep in a real bed and eat real food and take a real bath in exchange for sex. And he knows that Virus would have gone willingly, would have gone not only for the bed and the food but for the chance to prove how useful he was to the doctors, to show them that he was worth keeping around and worth protecting from the more dangerous experiments. And he knows that as the years passed, Virus continued to do this not only for himself but for Trip.

 _He does whatever they tell him, even now_. And he knows it's happening in the next room, that Virus is on his knees, sucking a dick that violated him for twenty-one years and taking another one up the ass. He remembers a time when he was eight and Virus fourteen, when a doctor had rubbed Virus' head for far too long and affectionately said he was a good patient, so eager to please, and Trip had been quietly enraged that someone else had touched Virus like that. But he hadn't understood it then.

"We'll get to what's going on there. Look at the fucking screen," he barely registers the hiss in his ear as the man jerks his head around; it's only then that he realizes he'd been looking at the door.

Virus standing now, moving in the languid way of one drugged, at once inhuman and seductive, as he reaches for the man and runs his hand up his thigh, his hand small, helpless. He grins then, and there is nothing childish in his expression. Trip remembers what they used to call him as he slowly unbuckles the doctor's belt, unzips his fly, and Trip is cringing, letting his vision slide out of focus, because he knows where this is going and knows that it hasn't stopped, that for twenty long years Virus kept this from him, that for all of his sadistic viciousness, his delight in torture and manipulation, he had vulnerabilities of his own. And what vulnerabilities they are.

The doctor is touching him again, running his fingers through his hair, digging into his scalp. "Virus used to touch you like this, didn't he? When you had your little...episodes, and he'd be the only one you let touch you. He'd sit next to you and do this, sometimes for hours. You two were truly fascinating to watch. We were fortunate that you found one another. It made you both so....easy to manage." He pauses. "You even dye your hair to match him. Same hair, same eyes, same earrings, same clothes..."

He struggles to ignore him, but the only other thing in the room he can focus on is the screen, the soft cries of the tiny boy on the screen as he’s fucked now; he’s sobbing, and seeing that face he at once knows and doesn’t know, tear-streaked and flushed, unhinges something in him. Trip has had sex with enough prostitutes by now to know, know that the sounds he’s hearing, the expression on Virus’ face, are those of acceptance of his fate. This had not been a bizarre happenstance that occurred once or twice a year, but a regular event that he’d come to accept by the time he was ten. _Years before I even met you._ Trip numbly fixates on his collar, the only thing he’s still wearing, proof that he’s an object, an experiment, as the man speeds up and Virus’ spine arches in pain, and then suddenly the video stops.

“I have a lot to show you tonight. Let’s see this one…Ah yes, just a few weeks before you two met, I believe.”

His stomach lurches again at the sight, because he’s right. This is the boy he first laid eyes on so many years ago, and yet he can’t make sense of this, can’t align the Virus he knows with the Virus on the screen. Virus who was always pretty, gorgeous even, a femininity in his long tapered fingers and pale lashes and easy smile, but his softness ended there, ended in the vicious cut of his teeth and the narrow gleam in his eye, the way he’d calmly grind his wingtip heel down onto a dying man’s throat as he spat on his face because a drop of blood had gotten on his new wool coat. This Virus he sees now, slight of build but already long-legged, tall for his age of twelve, calmly bending over to suck someone’s dick while another man touched him, is at once the exact same in that deceptive delicacy, and so horrifically different in that he’s at the other end of a game Trip had always thought they hadn’t started playing until they were adults.

“He got better around this time; so much easier to manage once he could properly orgasm and didn’t just cry the whole time. We stopped drugging him.”

“Don’t wanna know this.” But a part of him does, and that knowledge makes his skin crawl. They’d always had such precarious boundaries, lines they never crossed with one another, and he feels as he watches this that he is violating the worst of them, penetrating Virus’ darkest secrets. He wants to run, to forget everything he’s just seen, but he can’t tear his eyes away either, because his own darkest secrets are laid bare here – his attraction to Virus, his desire to touch him like that, to _fuck_ him like that. Something else inside of him grows hot as the boy on the screen suddenly glances at the camera, the boredom in his eyes shifting to a certain _knowing_ , cold, unabashed, shameless. And then the screen turns black.

“Next one. He’s fifteen here. I can feel you shaking. This is making you very uncomfortable, hm?” he digs his fingers in, lightly applies pressure until Trip is forced to raise his head again. “I’ve heard enough stories about you two to know you shouldn’t be affected by this. You traffic women, don’t you? Girls even, I’m sure. I’ve heard some unpleasant things about you and girls. And there was that nurse when you were fourteen… You always were the violent one.”

“It’s because-”

He cuts him off, his response slicing through the air in all its brutality. "You're in love with him."

He doesn't answer. _Love_. It’s not a word he thinks when he sees Virus, when the air stills and settles around his ears and tongue and he feels a certain calm, a _rightness_ , curling around his spine whenever the older man looks at him. It’s not what he considers when they fall asleep on the couch together some nights, a tangle of limbs and shared breath, what he thinks when he awakens in the morning and lies there studying Virus for some long minutes before moving, feeling oddly rested and alert despite the uncomfortable position and the late night.

But as he struggles to process the concept, the doctor keeps going. "You're the worst kind of fag. At least Virus is open about it. He accepts that he's a useless whore. And it's just a sex thing for him. He likes it up the ass. But _you_. You hide it. You run around fucking everyone's wives hoping it will make your normal while you _pine_ for him. You legit love him, yea?" He slaps the back of his head then and Trip grits his teeth so hard he feels something shift, a filling knocked loose by his attempts to suppress his rage.

So he can only struggle to ignore the doctor’s words and watch the screen. The new video makes him sick, unsure if the fire in the pit of his stomach is due to arousal or disgust, because his memories did not fail him. Virus at _this_ age, the Virus Trip knows so well, the Virus who existed as Trip slowly became aware of his own body, is devastatingly attractive, now wearing nothing but a doctor’s coat, looking oddly proud of himself as he snaps a surgical mask over his face and spreads his legs. His eyes are wicked as he reaches his hand out for the man offscreen, and Trip realizes then by the size of his pupils that the man had lied earlier.

“Hmm, he’s getting more beautiful, isn’t he? We all noticed how much you stared at him…used to place bets on when you’d try to get your hands on him, but then you never did and even now you haven’t, apparently. That’s a bit sad, given how much time you spend together, and how you mimic him as much as possible…” he pauses, and Trip senses by the shift in pressure on his back that he’s aroused now, watching himself push Virus down and shove a metal implement up his ass while he bucked and moaned. “He really enjoyed it by this point, could come just from his prostate sometimes. That’s a speculum. It’s amazing what we were able to fuck him with, with a little KY jelly.”

Trip bites his lip, resists the urge to snap, to point out that he was still clearly drugged there, that he wasn’t in control of himself, because even as he thinks it, the conviction dissipates. Could be zopiclone or ketamine, but it could also be cocaine, an aphrodisiac, anything, really, and he’s unsure it even matters as his gaze fixates on how perfectly Virus’ back arches, how his soft gasps echo inside his mask, how his fingers twitch as he begins jerking himself off, how he suddenly props himself up on one elbow as the doctor slides the instrument out of him and unbuckles his belt. And then it’s gone.

“I think he even cares about you, a little. But ah, he’s eighteen in this one,” and as he opens a new file, Trip can’t help but fixate on how many he skips, how many secrets still lie there, because anything is better than thinking about the comment he’d just callously made.

He’s leaning forward then, and he’s unsure if it’s to lean away from the man’s touch or because he’s more interested than ever, but the moment he realizes what he’s doing he freezes.

“He was free here. His first checkup outside, and he still did this. Freezes up, just like you’re doing now, and acts like a child. I always have cameras hidden in the office when he comes now.”

Eighteen. Another Virus he barely ever knew, the older man having been whisked out of the institute only a few days past his birthday, not to meet Trip’s eyes again for two years, two months, and six days, because Virus was twenty when they met again, and Trip had always wondered what he was like in those long years. _Vulnerable_ , he knows that now. Helpless, even, because as he finishes all the regular things that come with a checkup and he’s sitting on the edge of the examination table, ankles crossed and shoulders hunched, the doctor approaches him, strokes his face so that he glances up, startled, and Trip can see the change come across him as he understands that the nightmare of the last nine years of his life is not over. He slides off the table, falls to his knees and begins undoing the man’s belt, unzipping his fly as he continues to caress his face. His fingers don’t shake, but there is a hesitancy and a despair in his motions that is unrecognizable to Trip and he can’t peel his eyes away.

“It’s hard to understand, isn’t it, why he does this… But then, everything about him is difficult. He’s a fascinating case, an enigma, really, for all that he has experienced without exhibiting any real signs of caring about it. You know that though, I suppose, with the way you live with him, copy his every move. Surely you’ve studied him just as much as any of us…” As he rambles on, Trip understands that something is happening, but he can’t quite put his finger on it.

It doesn’t matter though, because now the Virus on the screen, _the elusive eighteen-year-old Virus_ , his adult height but still far too thin, slow to grow into himself, all but his face, his _babyface_ , so young looking that at twenty people would mistake fourteen-year-old Trip for being the elder, is now about to be fucked. Pulled upright eventually and pushed back against the examination table, ass at the edge as the doctor calmly strips off the clothing Virus had put on again only moments before and pulls out a rubber glove and a tub of some viscous fluid. Trip finds himself scarcely breathing as he watches this new Virus, a Virus he’d never known existed until less than half an hour ago, turns his face away from the doctor, and inadvertently towards the camera. He keeps his eyes open as the doctor roughly fingers him, puts his dick in position and shoves into him, and the look on his face reminds Trip of the one he’d had several videos and nearly a decade earlier. _Acceptance_.

“Have you ever taken it up the ass?"

The question startles him, but not so much that he can tear his eyes away. _Every time he goes to the doctor now. He acts like a kid again._ It's not just Virus, because Trip replies, finally dully aware of what is happening to him even as he keeps watching, even as he whispers a hoarse, "No."

"Ah. So you're nothing like him, after all. Not. At. All."

He feels that visceral disgust crawling down his spine again, the shaking that takes root so deeply in his muscles that only he knows it's happening, the horror flooding his veins with adrenaline. It's been a long time since he felt this sick, a decade since he was inside those white walls, sitting on a cot waiting for them to come and cut him open and rewire him and sigh in disappointment over things he couldn't understand.  It's a voice he recognizes well, yet again mocking him, telling him that he isn't good enough, that he can never be like him. He feels the strength drain from him slowly as the video changes again.

"Don't you want to be like him, to understand him?"

He watches the screen another moment, looks at the Virus depicted there, a side of him he’d never seen, never even known existed. Virus in his early twenties by then, off to a doctor’s appointment with a date immediately after, so he’d always say, leaving Trip at home to fend for himself for dinner while he was fucked over an operating table and occasionally brought to a luxurious apartment where the same group of men who terrorized him as a child could have their way with him, while he grinned and did everything they asked and was every inch the slut they called him. He carries himself well in these later videos, playing his part, managing to act as if he’s in control, taking initiative, but Trip knows him better than that; he can see the disgust in his eyes, the _fear_. He looks like a child again. He watches and then he slowly hangs his head.

"Good boy," he whispers then, an echo from ten years past, seventeen years past, the last words he heard whenever he went under. "Do you want to be drugged the way we used to drug him?"

He nods once.

 

\--

Virus feels that something is different, a subtle shift in their relationship that he finds himself unprepared to acknowledge, but he supposes it’s nothing significant. Trip has history enough of acting strange at times, especially when spooked, and he was clearly spooked that day. What about, Virus doesn’t know. Because they had spent their time in separate rooms in separate wards, and despite all that he had gone through, he had been released first, only to find a groggy and irritable Trip slouching into the waiting room nearly an hour later. “Fucking MRIs. Wanted to put me under for whatever. Moved too much I guess,” was all he’d said. He’d accepted it, because for all their medical similarities, there were enough differences to warrant very different check-ups, very different procedures over the years, and very different supplements injected into them from time to time. Never mind what he experienced behind closed doors while the doctors merely puzzled over Trip’s neurological issues.

Since then, he’d been more irritable at work, something Virus didn’t think much of because he was used to his moods. No, it wasn’t his attitude that made him believe something was different. It was the touching. Trip leaning over and around him more often, hovering closer than normal, putting his arm around him to point at things instead of merely using his other hand for it, resting his hand on his shoulder, his arm on the back of the couch behind Virus. They’d shared a bed twice since that night, hardly unusual given that they did that a few times a month ever since Trip had been released from the institute, but the second night he’d put an arm around him. _I’m not a woman, Trip_ , was enough to make him roll over, give a half-asleep apology. Again, nothing unusual in itself. They’ve had their share of drunken nights and tangled limbs. Nothing in itself was odd, so Virus felt it best to just ignore it.

At least until a couple of weeks have passed, and Trip himself breaks the silence.

“I can’t keep doing this,” he says abruptly one night, smacking the back of the couch with a kitchen towel.

Virus cocks his head lazily, glances at him from the corner of his eye with a smile tugging at the corner of his lips. “Somebody’s supposed to come fix it Tuesday. We can survive another three days without a dishwasher.”

"That’s not…” and in that fraction of a second that he pauses, he averts his eyes, “They made me watch old videos."

He freezes, and as realization slowly dawns on him, the color drains from his face. Not much can bother Trip, not with what he’s seen, what he’s carried out, only things that directly affect one of them, and Virus _knows_ , these are not old videos of Trip, these are _those_ videos, the hundreds made over two decades, the ones he has stumbled upon once or twice despite his efforts to ignore their existence. But even though he knows already, knows why he’s been odd since their day at the _hospital_ , he still tries to stem the flood of fear with rationale, still asks, "What? Who?"

"I...didn't know. It was that bad."

"It wasn't," he exhales quickly. _No, I can’t pretend after all_. He feels the air being sucked out of the room around him, his next words tight, painful. “What did they show you?”

But Trip ignores him, stubbornly shoving forward now that he’s voiced what had been on his mind all week. " _Nine_ , Virus? Nine. Why didn't..."

"I tell you? How could I tell you? We don't have that kind of... It doesn't matter to us." He tries to smile but he’s having difficulty making his body behave.

“And they’re still doing it to you?” He laughs then, a short and vicious bark, “No, Virus. That matters to us.”

Something snaps in him then, because he’s throwing his book down, standing abruptly only to have the floor rush up to meet him, only to fall to his knees as he struggles to breathe. _That laugh, that feral, predatory laugh._ He knows it too well, and he can’t recall the last time he felt this much fear. He sighs, rolls his shoulders and forces himself to meet Trip’s eyes as he grins. “I guess that’s it then, huh.”

As always when he gets like this though, Trip doesn’t hear him, his language sliding into his childhood habits and slurred words. “That fuck kept you as his little whore the whole time we were in there, diddling you when youse wasn’t even ten, making videos of you to sell online, selling you to other doctors at the institute, taking you home and handfeeding you and letting you play dressup like a fuckin’ pet before he rapes you again. He broke you so bad even when you got out ya kept spreading for him. All this time. You go to the doctor every month for 12 more years for your checkup and rape. No wonder you always refused to go the same time as me and was upset we gotta scheduled together. Just figured you were shy. Weird. Like it’d be too much like old times if we went. But no. S’cause you’d go play a slut for him n’ anyone else he invited. I saw ‘em fuck you and spitroast you and bukkake on you and shove stuff in you, just use you, like we do whores. I saw _all_ that.”

And throughout this deluge, Virus gets smaller and smaller, closes in on himself. He feels the past descend upon him in a screaming roar, a dozen hands tearing into him in the dark as he lies there, cold and still and unable to move but awake, so horribly _awake_ , on the operating table, and his own hands are up around his ears then, begging for silence and forgetfulness, all of his carefully constructed walls and locked rooms falling apart, years and decades of work amounting to nothing. The horror of Trip _knowing_ , of acting on what he knew, is nothing compared to the horror of being confronted with the past by the one person he ever felt comfortable with.

Only when the tirade is over does Trip pause, register what had just been said, “What’s _it_? What the fuck are you on about?”

The next words burn as they come out. “Trip. It’s over then. I’ll leave.”

He can see the rage in his eyes as Trip lunges for him then, and he recoils, fingers scrabbling on the floor as he backs himself up against the wall, heart pounding and mouth raw with the taste of fear. Because he never wanted Trip to know that part of him, the vulnerable part, the weakness he’s kept buried deep within him all these years. _He’ll leave if he knows. He’ll hate you, see you as weak, useless, vile._ He remembers the disgust in Trip’s eyes when someone they torture begs for mercy, when someone they drug and rape cries, when someone they kill pisses himself in fear before the end. Trip despises weakness of any kind, and he knows there was a lot of weakness recorded in those videos back then, a lot of tears and a lot of pain and a lot of everything that makes Trip’s lip curl and his eyes turn cold. But it’s more than just weakness, it’s the vulnerability he exhibited in later years, as he grew used to it, accepted his fate, learned to play the whore so that it would be less painful, so that he might get something, anything, out of it, so the doctors would be pleased with him, would be kinder to him even as they fucked him and cut him open and viewed him as nothing but a cumbucket and a lab rat. It’s the idiocy, the depravity, the brazen sluttishness of the times he went to them when he was freed, when he had twelve long years to say no and never did. Because while Trip happily uses prostitutes, turns desperate and lonely wives into whores by fucking new fetishes into them and abandoning them as soon as he gets bored, he spits at men who act like that, mutters that they deserve everything that happens to them when they turn up dead, because if they like it up the ass they’re weak, worthless, don’t even have tits so what do they think they’re doing trying to sell their ugly wares. He remembers a handful of times when he and Trip had grabbed some hapless fool at a club who batted his eyes at one of them, had dragged him into an alley or forced him into the backseat of a car and played with him, gangraped him. He’d always watched Trip those nights, tried not to think about what those hands felt like, tried not to look at his dick, and had taken his frustration out on whoever was with them at the time.

But now, as the younger man stands over him, punches the wall above his head and slides down to a crouch, boxing him in with his arms, calmly growls out a _What? I don’t think so_ , he’s not so sure he wants that strength directed towards him.

 _I’m not a woman, Trip,_ he’d said that night. He knows what women say about him – _protective_ – but he also knows the truth of how he behaves around women – _possessive_ – and suddenly all of Trip’s movements in recent weeks make sense. Because now Trip knows everything, and Virus knows this can only go in so many directions. The younger man will be repulsed by him, want him out of his life forever, or he will see him as nothing but a toy now. Something to _possess_. And maybe the logical conclusion of all that recent touching, the pushiness, is Trip fucking him. He knows how he handles weakness. It’s been a long time since he felt afraid of Trip, been afraid of himself for the way thoughts of being raped by _him_ make him feel, but despite the fear, the curiosity that always seems to dominate his thoughts of his partner reins, and he finds himself asking, “Is this why…you’ve been a little pushy? Lately.”

“Huh?” But he doesn’t move, doesn’t drop his arms or pull back.

“You want to do it to me, too?” He knows he should stop, knows provoking Trip when he’s like this is not only stupid but dangerous, because as much as the younger man is devoted to him, his wrath is as blind as it comes. But he can’t stop himself, can’t hold back his curiosity, his desire to taunt, manipulate – in moments like this, when they’re both cornered like rats in a cage again, neither are spared their mutual brutality – though he also knows it’s something more, that sick part of him he buries deep twenty-nine days of every month, the ugly masochism normally kept under lock and key in his mind, because the walls have been broken down now. Sometimes he thinks it will devour him whole, that he will self-destruct from being forced to keep it inside, but now it is unleashed.

Trip withdraws them, drops his arms and sits back, exhaling loudly. When he finally speaks, he ignores the question, lying through omission, but what he says surprises the older man. “Wasn’t tryna be pushy. Just… I just didn’t know they were messing with you that bad.”

“I don’t need that. You saw the videos. I do it willingly,” he snaps.

He raises an eyebrow, and Virus realizes too late that he’s gasping for air again, his voice pitched and frantic.

When he speaks again, the words are slow, ponderous, as he tilts his head and narrows his eyes. “He said you didn’t care. You’re interesting ‘cause you don’t get trauma.”

“He would say that,” he forces himself to breathe, to calm down, and in doing so he pats Trip’s knee, touching him for the first time since this had started. He knows there’s another meaning beneath his words, whole thoughts going unvoiced because Trip isn’t used to deep conversations. He is at once blunt and deceptive, a mix Virus had always found appealing. And Virus knows him well enough to pick up the relevance in his pauses, but he still catches himself saying something stupid. Pretending there’s nothing more to Trip’s words. “But maybe it’s true, hm? You never noticed.”

“You looked scared a minute ago.”

It’s something he isn’t keen on Trip noticing. The _trauma_ , such an ugly word, screaming of weakness. He wants peace, silence in a dark room so he can carefully rebuild those walls again. “I thought you’d do something for a minute there.”

“Like fuck you.” There’s something cold in his stare as he says it, something naked and ugly that causes Virus to draw back against the wall again. He’s too open now, too raw, too aware of a tension between them he’d always been able to ignore.

“Maybe.”

"He said you was always primed to go." His filter has never been very good, and when upset or aroused, it grew even worse. There were more than a handful of nights over the years when Trip came home early from a night out with the red imprint of a hand on his face. He’d always just shrugged, said he’d said the wrong thing, her tits were too small or she wasn’t so attractive without her makeup on.

"Trip," he smiles weakly. _This, he can talk about_. Sex, even that kind of sex, is always an easier subject than emotions.

"Sorry."

The hint of genuine feeling in Trip’s reply causes him to hesitate, reconsider his comment. It is behavior so unlike both of them and the thought makes Virus’s smile freeze, makes him reconsider what he’d been about to say. "Watch your verbs."

"So you really like it?"

"I don't know if I'd say that I like it, but my body reacts now. That kind of stimulation can take getting used to." _I do like it though. Or I could._ But he doesn’t point that out.

"He said you could orgasm just from the ass." Even as he says it, there’s a look on his face as if he knows he’d gone too far, the raised eyebrows, the grimace.

 “Ah," he runs a hand through his hair and sighs. Something about _Trip_ saying these things makes him warm. "It's...really embarrassing that he told you these details."

"Can you? I mean, I saw you did it in the videos anyway. Figured it was drugs." He's pushy, persistent as ever. Sometimes his cluelessness is entertaining, even endearing, but now it's difficult, frustrating.

"Yea, even without drugs. It takes longer but...it’s," he catches himself in time, stops before he admits that the orgasms are better, that they leave him weak-kneed and so sensitive that the slightest touch can make him sob, that those orgasms are a small part of why he puts up with the abuse. The only part he can really understand.

“He said you were better ‘bout it later, when you got older. So you got used to it?”

His stare is too intense and Virus averts his eyes. _When you got older._ He remembers when that shift happened. It was because of Trip that it became easier, because he suddenly had something, some _one_ else to think about, thoughts that turned from a mere _what is he doing right now_ to _what if this were him touching me, fucking me_ as Trip grew older, more attractive. “I got used to it.”

"I wouldn't think that's easy."

"What do you know about it?"

"I let him do it to me."

He opens his mouth to ask, clarify, but the look in Trip's eyes stops him, and for a moment he is silent, unable to fathom  it. _Trip, at this age and size, allowing that to happen to him._ And he’s not sure if he’s angry when he reaches out to touch his shoulder, his head, only to have him flinch before leaning into his touch.  "Oh. Trip… After he showed you the videos?”

“Uhm, and during. I was drugged by then but they kept going. He showed me, what they were doing to you in the other office. Direct video feed I guess. Kept mentionin’ how I try to copy you and-“

Virus cuts him off. This is more than he wants to know, more than he’s ready to consider, much less accept. It’s bad enough that he saw what he saw, but to know this, _that Trip would go so far for him,_ is more than he can bear _._ And he feels anger now, that the doctor was so easily able to take advantage of him, that all he had to do was suggest to Trip that he wasn’t _enough_ like Virus because he hadn’t been assaulted to make him do whatever he wanted, though there’s no point in saying that. "You are kind of stupid sometimes."

He shrugs, and the movement makes Virus slip his hand down to the side of Trip’s face as the younger man replies. “I wanted to be like you. Understand, maybe.”

“Shh,” Virus slides a thumb over his lips now. There’s too much emotion there, too much binding them together and Trip has crossed a line in saying that, so instead he focuses on the physical, the visceral. The contours of his face feel right beneath his fingers. He will be able to feel his teeth clench, much the way his own are before he whispers. “Did _you_ like it?”

“No.”

He’d been hoping for something more. Details, even, because he finds himself curious, intrigued, aroused even, beneath the confusion of emotions he isn’t used to. Because now that the fear has ebbed away, he is quietly intrigued by him, by the show of strength and rage the younger man had felt _for_ him. He sighs before dropping his hand and leaning back. “You don’t have to keep doing it, just because I do.”

“Wouldn’t do it again anyways. Even though he called me a fag.”

His curiosity is piqued even more then, because for all his feigned indifference towards Trip’s sexual life, it’d always been something he’d wondered about, “Well, _are_ you?”

He shrugs and falls silent, only to surprise Virus a moment later when his attention shifts, when his eyes suddenly meet his and harden. “Depends on the guy.”

The directness unnerves him. “Mmm, I’m assuming he wasn’t to your liking? He isn’t very attractive. That doctor was the one who first did it to me, who always did it the most. I think he got divorced because of me. His wife found out. But you know, he told me he wasn’t attracted to you so it’s weird-”

“Divorced? ‘Cause he brought you home sometimes?”

“Maybe. It didn’t happen much though, just a handful of times. Too risky. But it was so good to get out, I wouldn’t care as much those days,” it’s too much, _too much_ , and he’s cursing himself as he bites the last words out.

“So you did care.”

“Can you say our past doesn’t affect you?” He catches his pronoun slip but makes no attempt to correct it, another sign that they are one and the same, bound together by their inconceivable past. There’s no way to ignore it anymore, not after what he’d just let slip. _Better to make it about them._ Because he knows it affects Trip, knows that certain words, certain scents, certain sights, trigger something deep within his consciousness and cause him to shake, to recede within himself. Sometimes he erupts into violence, and sometimes he stays in his room, catatonic and silent, his face buried in Welter’s mane, only reacting when Virus comes to him, chatters about nothing and rubs his head and stirs him from the past. They never talk about those days. “We pretend, but we just handle it differently, that’s all.”

“You let yourself get fucked,” but his voice is gentle, exhausted, beyond accusations now.

“It’s a release. A coping mechanism.” He doesn’t believe his own words. Clinical garbage he’s accumulated over the years from being a medical experiment, from reading thousands of medical texts, from having an obsession with the field since he was young. Because the only way to control the past is to make it your own, dominate and internalize it, something he knows Trip has never properly learned.

“I saw that first time it happened when you got out, yea? Didn’t look like that. Looked like you were sad about it. The look girls have after their first night as a whore when they thought it’d be fun.” A sight he knows well, as he’s been an on-and-off driver for the Yakuza’s call girls ever since he got a license.

“Ah.” He remembers that day well, remembers drinking until he was sick that night, remembers shooting up while his hands were still shaking and lying in bed on the edge of consciousness for an indefinite period of time. He’d never experienced wrath before, and that was the day he’d come closest to understanding the red-haired boy he’d left behind those white walls only a month before. “We’re still human, for all that.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s the natural order of things, to destroy, isn’t it? We self-destruct in different ways.”

He doesn’t answer, only turns and leans his back up against the wall beside the older man, shoulders and hips and thighs touching in the space between the wall and the couch. He’s silent for a time, minutes stretching into a half an hour as they sit together, and Virus waits for him. He knows Trip operates on a different clock, knows and has never minded it. He appreciates his silences, especially now, after _that_ , and after some time he leans against him, slows his breathing to match his. This, _this_ is the natural order of things. Trip won’t leave him now. And he himself won’t leave. He can’t. They can’t.

It is Trip who finally speaks, finally breaks the silence now only interrupted by the faint sound of rain outside, and as he speaks he presses into him, curls his lip in a smirk. “I think you’re fucked up.”

He grins, “Probably. But didn’t you put a conbini clerk in the emergency room recently?”

“Ya. Were out of spicy chicken nuggets.”

“It was cute.” And it was. He remembers watching, laughing, rubbing Trip’s shoulders afterwards and inhaling the scent of his anger, getting the CCTV feed illegally to watch later, touching himself to it.

He laughs softly, and Virus feels something inside him grow warm and tight as the younger man elbows him and mutters, “I just _said,_ I think you’re…”

It’s that warmth, that tightness, that causes him to cut him off, raise a hand to his lips and press against his mouth for the second time that night. “Don’t. It’s too weird when you keep saying _fuck_ about me.”

Trip doesn’t reply, only grabs his hand and clenches his fingers. It’s a night of brutishness, of acting on instinct, behaviors Virus normally avoids at all costs to maintain control over whatever he can control. It’s what happens when the past is laid bare, when the natural order of things comes to light. So when he twists his hand out of Trip’s only to grab it again, to draw it up his thigh and over his hip, splay his fingers across his belly, he makes no attempt to hesitate. He’s breathing heavily, preparing himself for the moment when Trip shoves him back in disgust.

But it doesn’t happen. Instead Trip freezes for a moment, half a breath of uncertainty before relaxing, and then he’s tugging at his shirt, pulling it up enough to slide his hand underneath and press it flat against stomach. And Virus leans into him, presses his face against his neck and strokes his chest, slips his hand down to his waist and listens to him breathe. He was made brutally aware in the last hour how much he desires the younger man, and now with the feel of skin on skin, his arousal becomes far more than just a passing distraction, a fixation on how Trip said certain words or moved certain ways. He thrusts his hips forward so that his erection presses into his partner’s knee, darts his tongue out to taste the sweat on his collarbone. There is a slowness to their actions, an uncertainty as boundaries already torn down earlier that evening give way to the final barrier between them.

And still, it isn’t long before he feels Trip’s mouth on his, and then all of hesitancy is gone. There is a distinct shift in the younger man, a growl low in his throat when Virus opens his mouth and accepts his tongue, and he’s pushing him back into the wall, devouring him, and Virus feels something break inside of himself, a sense of urgency and desperation that can only be found in sex taking over as he explores him. His hands are everywhere, eagerly pulling Trip to him, running fingers up the muscles in his arms and over his back, tugging at his hair and slipping past his shirt collar, sliding down his torso to palm his obvious erection. And his legs are around his hips then as he arches against the wall, presses himself into his lap and throws his head back to bare his throat. He doesn’t realize how much he is shaking until Trip takes the invitation, shoves a hand down the back of his pants and grabs his ass, in the same moment he bites down. It’s everything Virus is desperate for - violent, assertive, _possessive_.

He gasps then, a sharp intake followed by a soft sound he’s already cursing himself for as they both lean back in the same moment, hands sliding off skin as their eyes meet and they know it’s gone too far, that for all the vulnerability Trip was witness to when he saw those videos, when he saw Virus fall to the floor not an hour ago, this is a different sort, one that carries the weight of consent and desire and a thousand other things that have hovered delicately in the air between them for over ten years. They both want it, need it, but not like this. Not with what just happened to them. Not with that secret between them suddenly laid bare, raw and bleeding. 

As quickly as it has begun, it’s over. While he struggles for air, Trip sits back against the wall beside him, shoulders and hips and thighs touching again, with a new heat and a new meaning to the contact. They are both shivering, and Virus is unsure if it’s in arousal or in some other, more foreign sort of exhilaration, one that comes with knowing that after all this time, after all he knows, all he’s done, Trip is still attracted to him. All he knows is that it is no longer fear.

It’s some time before either speaks, before Trip leans into him and presses his face to his ear and whispers, sending sparks of heat down his spine all over again. “Want me to sleep in your bed again tonight?”

The weight behind the words goes unspoken, _And put my arm around you again, and touch you the way I just did, and treat you like a woman._ Yes, yes, _yes, I want that, more than anything_ , but he doesn’t say it.

He only shrugs. After all, they self-destruct in different ways.

 

 

 

 


End file.
